In recent years, telephone call centers have become much more widespread. The call centers manage many efforts, and call center agents working in these centers often place thousands of calls to various consumers in different regions of the country. These agents often use headsets to speak with consumers while the agents concurrently enter information relating to the consumers into a computer workstation.
Under the traditional approach, companies interacted with potential consumers in person. Telephone call centers have become more widespread as a result of a desire by many of such companies to interact with consumers via telephone instead. Using this form of communication, call center agents are able to conduct many transactions over a short period of time.
There are a wide variety of transactions carried out by these telephone call centers. For example, banks may want to contact current customers and ask these customers if they would be interested in obtaining a new credit card. Long distance telephone companies may want to contact homeowners and ask if they would be interested in switching long distance carriers. Fund raisers may call individuals to ask for donations. And various other telemarketers may call homeowners or business owners for solicitation of various products or services.
Because there are so many different types of consumers and transaction types, there are many events and scenarios that may occur during a given session with a customer. Often, these events will occur as a result of input obtained from the customer, situations arising in the system related to the session with the customer, a combination of these, and the like. For example, a session may last longer than the fifteen minute baseline established at the outset with the customer (e.g., during a telephone survey). Or, the customer may have selected a purchase for an item having a set of other accessories that could be made known to the customer by the agent. Or, the customer may be designated as a VIP or platinum customer. All kinds of events could occur during the customer session that may affect the subsequent course of dealing between the customer and the agent.
In many cases, systems used by call center agents in telephone call centers provide some sort of notification that is intended to make the agent aware of a situation (which may need to be directly communicated to the customer, or which may cause the agent to take appropriate action in response to the notification). Though these notifications are intended to be used by the agents, they may often be missed or overlooked, because the agents are not aware of their existence. For example, the notifications may be sent to the agent's computer (or workstation) into a location (such as a database) that needs to be periodically, or manually, checked by the agent. Because the agent uses the computer for various purposes during a transaction with a customer, the agent may forget (or not have time) to manually check for notifications. Even if notifications are to be displayed to an agent somewhere on their computer display, the notifications are usually displayed on different screens from the session screen, or placed in obscure locations, making them difficult for the agent to see. Even if the agent is able to notice the notification, it is not always easy to obtain further detailed information about the nature (or cause) of the notification.
In addition, when such notifications of more traditional systems are built into the system, they often contain contents (and event triggers to initiate the notifications) that are predetermined. These notifications will not contain specific information about a particular customer, or be capable of being easily modified to be tailored for a specific session with a customer.